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Iraq's prime minister slashes cabinet by one-third

Haider al-Abadi reduces his cabinet from 33 to 22 members as he continues reform plan approved by parliament last week.

16 Aug 2015 20:12 GMT

The prime minister's decision, announced by his office on Sunday, would eliminate four ministries [Reuters]

Iraq's Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi has reduced his cabinet from 33 members to 22, as he consolidates the body as part of a major reform push in response to mass protests against corruption and poor governance.

The decision, announced by his office on Sunday, eliminates four ministries, including those of human rights and women's affairs, while consolidating others.

The move follows a far-reaching reform plan approved by parliament last week that eliminated the country's three vice presidencies and three deputy prime ministers, as well as reducing the budget for the personal bodyguards of senior officials and transferring it to the interior and defence ministries.

Iraqis have held massive protests in recent weeks against corruption and poor government services, focusing in particular on power outages that have made a recent heat wave even more unbearable.

Iraq's top Shia cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, has lent his support to demands for reform, and parliament unanimously approved the wider reform plan last week in a dramatic show of unity for a country plagued by sectarian and political rivalries.

Those reforms dismantled much of the top-heavy government erected in the years after the 2003 US-led invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein.

The three vice presidencies were intended to give equal representation to the country's Shia majority and Sunni and Kurdish minorities.

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Iraq is struggling to roll back fighters from the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), who swept across the border from Syria last summer and seized around a third of the country, including Iraq's second largest city, Mosul.